A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's
great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the
acclaimed novels "Snow and "My Name Is Red.
Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with
portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing,
and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an
ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his
imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric
extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically
sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first
intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of
his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial
glories, in a country trying to become "modern" at the dizzying
crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs
Pamuk's reflections as he introduces the writers and painters
(among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace
Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a
background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly
backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he
presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of
his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes
macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge
from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to
serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a
life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and,
even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls.
As much a portrait of the artist as a young manas it is an oneiric
Joycean map of the city, "Istanbul is a masterful evocation of its
subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as
the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write.
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